I think it's quite possible that Zappa's Synclavier music was largely too advanced for me. I like "Night School" from the JFH album, but the other stuff I've checked out (like Feeding The Monkeys at Ma Maison, and some of the Wolf Harbor suite on Dance Me This) didn't click with me. I appreciate the level of work that went into it, and I know on an intellectual level this is highly advanced stuff going on, but it didn't connect with my heart the way other FZ music has.
Maybe someday.
Some folks on this thread said that this music was not "scored" before being entered into the Synclavier and was transcribed afterwards. A lot of the documentarys I've seen of Zappa show him scoring his compositions on staff paper at the piano. I would think this is how he went about these compositions rather than actually "playing" the Synclavier. I would think that if the scores exist, someday somebody will attempt them. I appreciate those that have posted the links to the actual musicians playing this stuff. I already have the Yellow Shark and think it's brilliant. The other stuff, I haven't heard!
Given that Zappa wanted to be considered a composer in a similar vein to Boulez, Schoenberg, Stavinsky, Varese..... how do you rate him compared to "modern" composers. I would imagine that he's not in their league and we PE'ers tend to vault him in importance because of the rock music he created, which, for many of us, was the first avantish music we ever heard. I know that's the case for me. I'd imagine that Zappa would be given short shrift among the serious composers of the 20th century.
I remember Frank saying one time, the big problem was the musician's union rules, which stipulated that the musicians got paid for rehearsals the same way they did for a recording session or concert performance. I don't know what union scale was back in the 80's (or even now), but I imagine trying to make that music sound the way Frank wanted took more than a couple afternoons. And that could get very expensive, very quickly, before you even got to the actual recording session or performance.Originally Posted by Baribrotzer
If I'm not mistaken, The Yellow Shark was commissioned by Ensemble Modern's musical director, so they were using whatever funds they had at their disposal to do as many rehearsals as Frank thought was necessary before the red light went on, as it were.
By contrast, something like the two London Symphony Orchestra albums from the early 80's, Frank basically had to pay for himself, so he may have had to "settle" for whatever results he could get from the number of rehearsals he could afford, so the upshot may not been to his full satisfaction, whereas he reportedly felt The Yellow Shark was one of the more rewarding experiences of his career.
And I'll reiterate the point made by others that some of the sounds Frank used on the Synclavier recordings weren't always satisfying. I seem to recall there's a lot of stuff where it soundsli ke he's using slowed down human voices, for instance, and as he pointed out in one interview, even if you use samples of musical instruments, and even if you sample every possible sound a given instrument, say a sax, can make, on every single note of it's range, you still only have that one sample of that one sound. So every time let's say you want a tenor sax honk on a given note, let's say C# in whichever octave, you're going to get the exact same sound.
By contrast, in real life, each individual sound is a unique event, and even if that saxophonist plays that C# honk three or four times, each one is going to sound subtly different. You may not be conscious off the differences, but your brain (or some brains, maybe) can tell the difference. Same thing with sampled drums, sampled piano, sampled whatever. That's part of why drum machines are so unsatisfying, because each time the drummer hits, let's say the snare drum, it's a unique event, whereas the drum machine triggers exactly the same snare drum sample on each beat.
I'm told newer drum machines and I assume samplers as well, have the ability to cycle through multiple samples, so you have less of the "exact same sound" syndrome, so maybe that's not as much of an issue now as it was in, say, 1986.
^^ Our local symphony orchestra just went bankrupt because an agreement could not be made with the musicians regarding their compensation given the decrease in concert attendance. A real shame. Most of the folks at the concerts were very aged with the men falling asleep as soon as anything adagio was played. Not enough young interest to keep it going. I imagine getting an orchestra together to play challenging music would be almost impossible in most markets. Certainly in the US. Less so in Europe. Here in the US, your 'gonna get the old chestnuts if anything.
My recollection is that Zappa felt the Yellow Shark was the only reasonably accurate representation of his music by a classical ensemble.
Zappa used various different strategies for creating his Synclavier pieces. Some of them were based on pieces he had previously scored for traditional instruments. Some, I believe, were based on transcriptions of guitar solos. Many were created directly on the Synclavier. He had a story about a piece he created based on what he vaguely described as numerical "dust" that was an artifact of the Synclavier's operation. He did a lot of experimenting with different ways of combining and layering samples, creating something he called "resolvers." We hear a lot of stories about the vast number of pieces he left behind on the Synclavier, but I suspect that most of them are fragments, experiments, and sketches that Zappa wouldn't have released without extensive editing and revision.
Hurtleturtled Out of Heaven - an electronic music composition, on CD and vinyl
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[QUOTE=Guitarplyrjvb;748791]For what it's worth, I remember Frank that some of his pieces were written in airports and hotels, "with on appliances whatsoever", ie he would just imagine what he wanted to hear, and write it down on paper. A lot of composers have the ability to do that, I don't know if it's perfect pitch, or what, but I guess tehre's a lot of guys who hear a sound in their heard and they immediately it's "middle C" or whatever, they want to put on the paper. The thing with Frank was, he was doing that, but he was apparently also doing that with those complex rhythms. I hear rhythmic stuff in my head that's nowhere near as complex as what Frank was looking for, and I have no idea how to write it down. I mean, I can't even figure otu if I need a dotted 16th note in a certain place or if I need to ask for staccato playing on a certain part of a phrase, never mind all of those tuplets and weird time signatures Frank had.Some folks on this thread said that this music was not "scored" before being entered into the Synclavier and was transcribed afterwards. A lot of the documentarys I've seen of Zappa show him scoring his compositions on staff paper at the piano.
Depends on what you mean. Yeah, he certainly typed a lot of stuff into the Synclavier's sequencer, basically reading off sheet music he had already written out, but I also remember reading that he also played stuff from the "black and white" keyboard (as Morton Subotnick calls them) and even using a Roland Octapad (an 80's era MIDI percussion controller). I know he said he never used the guitar interface, because he didn't track fast enough to follow his playing (and also, he had relatively sloppy technique to begin with, hence any guitar synth interface available at the time probably would have had trouble following him).I would think this is how he went about these compositions rather than actually "playing" the Synclavier.
I dunno if he's "in their league", but I know his music is touted by some rather highly respected people in the orchestral world. I remember when Guitar Player and Keyboard magazine put out a special magazine on Frank, not long before he passed away, one of the people they interviewed was Kent Nagano, a conductor who specializes in contemporary music and who has worked with a number of top flight orchestras. And I got the impression he certainly felt Frank really was "that important". I also know that Nicholas Slominsky, a classical music professor famous for writing a book called The Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodies was friends with Frank and he too seemed to think Frank composed "extremely advanced" music.Given that Zappa wanted to be considered a composer in a similar vein to Boulez, Schoenberg, Stavinsky, Varese..... how do you rate him compared to "modern" composers. I would imagine that he's not in their league and we PE'ers tend to vault him in importance because of the rock music he created, which, for many of us, was the first avantish music we ever heard. I know that's the case for me. I'd imagine that Zappa would be given short shrift among the serious composers of the 20th century.
And the Ensemble Modern people were so enthusiastic about his music they not devoted an entire night's performance to his work, but they flew out to LA to participate in rehearsals, and they've continued to play his music since then. This wasn't a "We're only working with this guy because he's a famous rock musician and this will hopefully raise our profile with the public" publicity stunt (as apparently was the case when an opera company commissioned Stewart Copeland to compose an opera for them). According to Wikipedia, the initial Yellow Shark event was part of festival project that also involved performing the music of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and someone named Alexander Knaefiel. So at least as far as Ensemble Modern were concerned, you're talking about a guy who is important enough to put int he same mouthful as Cage and Stockhausen.
Now, you're going to have classical music snobs who will insist that people like Slominsky and Nagano didn't know what they were talking about and that Frank was "just another rock musician trying to rise above his station". Whether or not he'll be regarded in a hundred years the way Stravinsky or Bartok is today, is anybody's guess. I would like to think he will b
This is actually addressed in modern sample libraries, which use something called "round robin." Instead of a single C# or snare drum sample living under that key, you cycle through half a dozen different samples of the same instrument playing the same note so you don't hear the same one twice in a row.
Hurtleturtled Out of Heaven - an electronic music composition, on CD and vinyl
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[QUOTE=Mister Triscuits;748801].Zappa used various different strategies for creating his Synclavier pieces. Some of them were based on pieces he had previously scored for traditional instruments. Some, I believe, were based on transcriptions of guitar solos
While You Were Art was based off one of the tracks on Shut Up N Play Yer Guitar. In fact, there's a story about how he was actually asked by an LA based ensemble to prepare an arrangement of the original track to perform. Frank handed over the sheet music to them, and they said "Oh, we'll never be able to play this, there's not enoguh time to rehearse". So Frank talked them into basically miming to a recording of the piece, and supposedly nobody in the audience caught on until the cards were turned over after the fact. This apparently caused a big controversy, and the people from the ensemble repudiated the performance and said they'd never do anything like that ever again.
The Girl In The Magnesium Dress, to be exact.Many were created directly on the Synclavier. He had a story about a piece he created based on what he vaguely described as numerical "dust" that was an artifact of the Synclavier's operation.
I'd like to hear instrumental Ensemble Modern versions of the compositions from 200 Motels, an album I really can't stand.
Yes, this is precisely why Zappa's Synclavier work grates on my nerves. If you feed in a raw score -- such all the MIDI scores you can get online -- you get all the notes in the right order, but they're strictly off-and-on. There's no ARTICULATION. No human variations in timing, note strength, no pull-ons or pull-offs, no pauses to take a breath. J.S. Bach, among others, discovered that even music written for pipe organ -- where the performer doesn't provide the wind -- is improved by writing in human-sized phrases. Continuous playing leads to listener fatigue and a certain indefinable "robotic" quality.
I think I said that, actually, I just didn't know what it was called.
In Apple's GarageBand, using a touch-sensitive keyboard, there are DOZENS of samples under each key, depending on how hard you press. That sounds like a much more "musical" solution than randomizing articulation!
Well, you can program all of that into a sequencer. A bigger problem for me is the actual sounds that are being triggered.
Ugh, sorry, I managed to miss that last line. I'll shut up now.
Hurtleturtled Out of Heaven - an electronic music composition, on CD and vinyl
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Yes, articulation CAN be programmed in, on anything capable of it (not your standard sequencer). But it's a lot of work, and Zappa never bothered.
No, that's ok. It's easy to miss something you're skimming through an unnecessarily longwinded treatise. I imagine that's how most people read my posts, by skimming.
Another point about the issue is, ok, you can have as many samples as you think is necessary to emulate a real life drumkit (or a guitar or piano, etc) being played in conventional fashion, or any other instrument played the way they're meant to be played.
But what about if you take into unconventional playing techniques. For instance, on a drumkit, what about things like playing with rubber mallets, you can get different sounds by dragging the "rubber ball" across the head of the drum or the cymbals (you can do this with gongs, too, and probably other instruments). You'd have to have multiple samples of each sound to accommodate all that.
Same thing with any instrument. What if you want the sound of a woodwind player working the keys without blowing (there's a Varese flute piece that has such a passage, and I've also seen a bass clarinet player do it, also)? What if you want a clarinet or sax player to deliberately make a "honking" sound? Remember the "alto sax is blowing his nose" bit in Toads Of The Short Forest? Can you imagine trying to recreate that solo on a sampler?
Then there's all the different techniques you have with stringed instruments. Never mind all the dren electric guitarists do, just think about orchestral strings. There's so many different techniques that come into play, things like vibrato, how the bow is being used, things like harmonics, glissandi, there's even composers who have the players bowing behind the bridge or tapping the body of the instrument rhythmically.
What if you want the sound of someone strumming the strings inside the piano? What if you want him to take a razor and slide it down the length of the string (as per Henry Cowell's The Banshee...also a technique used by a lot of rock guitarists)? Or play the strings with mallets like a dulcimer, or bowing with the nylon threads (or even an E-bow...I read about a composer who modified a piano so that note would have it's own E-bow style contraption)? What if you want a prepared piano (one of my gripes with "digital pianos" is they never seem to take prepared piano possibilities into account)? What if you want the sound of the piano being set on fire (don't laugh, a composer named Annea Lockwood did such a recording)?
I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's very difficult, if not impossible to emulate using a bunch of microchips. Not that I'm saying samplers and digital replicas are useless, there's certainly places where they come in handy.
The first time I remember hearing about a synclavier was when I picked up a used 2 on 1 cd from Zappa that included "Chunga's Revenge" and "The Perfect Stranger". The liner notes described the synclavier as a keyboard computer. I still really like "The Perfect Stranger", and I like it a lot more than "The Yellow Shark" which I couldn't get into. So four tracks on here were the synclavier songs while the other three songs were conducted by Pierre Boulez.
"The wind is slowly tearing her apart"
Sad Rain
Anekdoten
I remember seeing ads in Guitar Player for the Synclavier's guitar interface back in 1983. At the time, Frank was writing a column for GP, and he did an installment on the Synclavier in the December 83 issue. I remember that the ad copy quoted a price of "starting at $16,000"! That's when I first learned how expensive those things were. Well, not quite, it was a few years later that I Read that a fully loaded Synclavier with all the options would go for something like a hundred grand. I also remember a couple decades later, Al DiMeola saying the main drawback to the Synclavier was that you had to re-mortgage your home every time they put out some new optional package that you couldn't live without.
Well, they were REVOLUTIONARY for their time, and were capable of fully-articulated human-sounding music -- if you put in the work. Several artists did, and their Synclavier performances still cut the mustard today.
Zappa did not. His music is nothing but player piano scores to these ears.
You are right on that one. Perhaps some things on wind-instruments could be emulated if one uses virtual modelling instead of sampling and use things like aftertouch, modulation wheels or other forms of modulation, to change the sound in the desired way.
But certain modern playingtechniques are even then hard to create. I suppose the sound of a piano put on fire could be recorded and used for future performances, to keep the costs down. Use multitrack recordings with different microphones at different positions and one can adjust the sound for every performance.
I suppose a prepared piano could be sampled as well. I think one reason why it hasn't been done could be, because it wouldn't be very usefull. The people who use digital instruments are not the one that would want the imitation of a prepared piano. Besides, there are so many ways a piano could be prepared, so for each set-up one would need a whole new set of samples.
Other things that can't be done on a digital piano, wether it uses samples, or virtual modelling is pressing the keys, without making a sound and then playing an octave below, so the overtones resonate.
Doing a little reading on the Yellow Shark and discovered that Zappa didn't do the orchestrations. Most of them were done by an assistant, Ali Askin, or the Ensemble Moderne musicians themselves. Kind of changes my view of the material. It's much more of a collaborative effort than I had thought.
But they make this digital piano deals, that have like a million different variations, like you can have any type of piano you want, whether it's an upright, baby grand, 8 foot Steinway or even the CP-70 (blech!). You can get a tack piano simulation or even an out of tune saloon type piano sound. All of those in one little keyboard, or in the case of something like Arturia, one little software package. I think the Arturia even has "virtual" pianos that don't exist in real life, things like a glass piano, or one made out of steel or whatever.
It seems to me if you can do all that, it would be a simple matter to program something that will out you put any preparation on any string (say, wood or metal bolts or paper clips or whatever) and have something that will allow you to determine where on the string you're placing the preparation.
As for whether or not anyone who uses prepared piano in their music would use such a thing, I'm not so sure they wouldn't. To do actual prepared piano, you have to have, at the very least, a baby grand piano (upright pianos often times can't hold the preparations because the strings on the vertical axis instead of the horizontal). Unless you get to specify exactly which make and model you're using (which you probably won't because you're probably not Ray Charles or Elton John or Harry Connick Jr or someone else famous enough to get such riders in their contract), you may not be able to get exactly the sounds you want.
And even if you can get exactly the make and model you want, you still have to stand there and measure out the distance to where you want to put each preparation. That could take a lot of time by itself, depending on how precise you want things to be.
Well, "orchestration" just means picking which instrument plays which voice. It's the same thing Ravel did with Pictures At An Exhibition, which Modest Mussorgsky originally envisioned as a solo piano piece. Ravel took the sheet music, decades later, and basically assigned the parts to the various instruments. There are other instances of this happening.Doing a little reading on the Yellow Shark and discovered that Zappa didn't do the orchestrations. Most of them were done by an assistant, Ali Askin, or the Ensemble Moderne musicians themselves. Kind of changes my view of the material. It's much more of a collaborative effort than I had thought.
Given the fact that Frank signed off on the whole project, I imagine Frank could have veto power on anything, he could have said, "Oh, that bit should be played by the flute instead of oboe" or whatever.
^^ Yes, Zappa did approve everything, but the orchestrations that were done were much more than assigning instruments to parts that Zappa had already wtitten. The players themselves came up with a lot of it as did Askin. I don't think Zappa's heroes (Varese et. al) would have left the orchestrations of their music to an assistant or the players.
Yes you have. I have the Arturia and it really does a fine job. Of course it would be possible to make a program which offers all the possibilities to prepare te piano any way, one would like it, but I wonder how many musicians would use an electronic replacement instead of a real piano. You never know what is in the future, but I'm not sure how many composers would be willing to use it now.
And I happen to like the CP-70. It is the pianosound I use mostly from my Nord Electro. For other pianosounds I use other instruments, like the Arturia package, or the sampler.
Orchestrating is a bit more than just assigning pianoparts to certain instruments. You also have to take in mind what can be done with those instruments. There are several different orchestrations of Pictures at an exhibition.
Re: Varese allowing someone else to orchestrate: He might've if he were dying of cancer and if the ensemble doing the performance were taking on the project primarily as a gift and as a tribute to the composer, as was the case with the EM and the Yellow Shark. Frank did a ton of orchestrating early in his career - 200 Motels, most of LSO too. Those were scores he prepared by hand. Yellow Shark was a late in life opportunity for him to hear his music (including Synclavier pieces which were, indeed not scored out initially but were inputted into the Synclavier by a variety of means: typing, playing on keyboard, drumming on octapad, then messing with the captured data inside the computer and shaping it painstakingly into a finished object) performed by a brilliant, enthusiastic, appreciated ensemble (and Ali) all of whom were willing and able to take on duties that Frank was too ill to do, even if he had conceived of the project himself (Yellow Shark was proposed to him, he didn't seek out the EM, they came to him and asked if he was interested. Good thing he was!).
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